causative

I spectated this game. |DnC|mash killed everybody.

If siege units dealt 10x counter damage to walls and wall turrets (similar to the 3x counter damage for pikemen vs cavalry) so they could take out walls in a couple of hits, I think that would be more balanced. They could still deal their normal damage of 150 against other units and buildings. Siege is really hard to maneuver into position and keep alive, and then they don't really deal damage that fast. In most multiplayer games, siege is used little due to those reasons; bases are usually captured using massed champions. So siege could use a massive buff to damage against walls, and then both walls and siege would be used, and both would be more balanced.

That's a good picture, Mr. Monkey. Here's the picture of the impenetrable fortress I mentioned that killed 570 of my champs, made by Finch. The fortress and military colony are fully garrisoned. I consider this position literally impossible to destroy using Briton technology, because siege rams can only approach one at a time due to the trees and there are plenty of arrows to quickly slaughter any champions. Note the multiple catapults (I count 5 catapults at this point in the game) which will quickly snipe any siege ram that makes it to the wall. The defending player, Finch, also had some cavalry champions of his own to help mop up. The game had become a 2v1 and together we couldn't break his walls. My ally (mapkoc) was Mauryans, and maybe massed Yoddha could have done something, but then again maybe not. If my civ could make catapults (Britons and Mauryans cannot) it's possible I could have done something. However, the defender, Finch, did have his own cavalry champions which are excellent for killing catapults. Consider that wall turret range is greater than catapult range. Finch also could have simply repaired his walls faster than a bunch of catapults could damage them, since catapults deal damage very slowly. Also note that these walls look sort of "normal," and yet if I sent in 50 brythonic longswords they would all quickly be slaughtered by the turrets and fortress/colony without making progress.

I have two claims. My first claim is that citizen soldiers are much less important than champion units in battle. My second claim is that it's not worth spending metal on citizen soldiers. I make these claims because champion units are supreme, and cost metal. Among good players in multiplayer, most armies consist of large numbers of champions. Citizen soldiers sometimes provide a little extra damage in battles between armies of champions, and are important to help garrison ships, fortresses, towers, and civic centers. As fighters by themselves, though, they are not worth much, especially as champion counts rise. 50 or 100 infantry champions can slaughter huge amounts of citizen soldiers with minimal or no losses. Almost all citizen-soldiers have low HP and very low pierce armor, and therefore they can't walk into a fortified and garrisoned enemy base without immediately dying. All champions cost metal, and metal is scarce. The limiting factor on how many champions you can make is the amount of metal you have; by the time you are making champions you usually have plenty of food and wood. Therefore, any citizen soldier that costs metal, prevents you from making more champions, which overall weakens your army. The only exception to this I've seen is the Spartan Skiritai Commandos, which only cost 10 metal and have extremely good stats for a citizen-soldier, so that it sometimes makes sense to make them. Still, an army of Skiritai Commandos can't stand up to an army of champion infantry. If you want distinctions between citizen-soldiers to matter more in 0ad, perhaps the game needs a low limit on how many champions you can have at one time, such as 25. But then we need a solution to the problem where citizen-soldiers can't approach garrisoned fortresses or CCs without being slaughtered.

Simple: play multiplayer. When you see someone who plays like a king with a higher economy score and more champions than everyone else, go to Replays (from the first screen: Tools & Options: Replays) and study what order they built things and harvested resources. Then, build things in that order yourself. A good player should be able to get to age III from low resources by around 12 minutes, with over 100 population, and then immediately research champions at the barracks (provided they have a civ compatible with that) and start producing them. It's not very difficult to learn a build order that will achieve this. Here is an example of a Briton build order, assuming a 200 population cap, chickens, and berries. Make 5 women (shift-click at your civic center, or CC, to make them) Use your first 4 women to make a farmstead by the berries, assuming you have berries. Have them get berries asap. Put your cavalry skirmisher on chickens, assuming you have chickens. With your 4 men, build a storehouse by the nearest big forest, and set them on chopping. Use your dog to explore (hold down shift and click repeatedly on the minimap to give him a path to explore, you want to explore the edge of your base first and then concentric circles out from there). Set a rally point on wood by the storehouse so that the first 5 women you made in step 1 will go there Queue up some more women one at a time as long as you have food. When the farmstead finishes, research Wicker Baskets (berry upgrade) and make sure the women who built the farmstead go to berries and not chickens. This will put you at about 0 wood from low resources. As soon as you have 75 wood again, have one of your woodcutters start making a house. You will want to constantly be making 1 house at all times, to keep up with your CC production. So, when this builder finishes, you immediately have him make another house, and so on until age III. You can queue up multiple houses at once by shift-clicking, however note that this uses up the wood for future houses immediately so you can't use it for anything else. Keep making women and putting them on wood until you're at maybe 22-25 population, then start having new women build fields. Fields should be placed as close to your CC or farmstead as possible. Five women go on a field. You'll probably end up with like 6-8 fields before it's time for age II. When you have wood to spare (that means you don't need any wood to immediately make houses or fields), research the first farming upgrade at the farmstead. When the berries run out, the 4 berry women make a field. When you have wood to spare, research the first woodcutting upgrade at the storehouse. When the cavalry skirmisher runs out of chickens, he can go help the dog explore. Produce women 5 at a time whenever you have enough food. It's faster. When you have enough wood, make a barracks. If you seem to have enough farms and wood you can switch your CC to producing men instead of women, and put them on stone and metal. Build a storehouse at the stone and metal. If you seem to have more food than you need but not enough wood, make women and put them on wood. If your woodcutters are too far from the wood, make another storehouse closer to the wood. You probably want another storehouse for woodcutters in a completely different stand of trees, anyway. At some point around when the barracks finishes, you should have enough food and wood for age II, and somewhere around 50-70 population. There's no reason to rush going to age II. Don't interrupt your production of workers just to save up for age II. The barracks should produce skirmishers that can either go on stone/metal or on wood, depending on which you need more. With the barracks and CC both producing units, you may need more than one worker making houses to keep up. When you reach age II, you may have too much food. If so, you can take 5 or 10 women off of farming and put them on woodcutting instead. When you reach age II, your first priority is a market, which you can make with a bunch of women. The market should be placed near the back of your base, on the side farther from your allies so that you can get a long trade route. When the market finishes, immediately trade any excess food for some stone and metal, whichever you have less of. Hopefully you were first to market - britons are fast - so you can get good prices. Research the metal mining upgrade, the second woodcutting upgrade and the second farming upgrade, whenever you have enough wood. You might get the metal mining upgrade during age I if you have enough wood. Make the other buildings you need for age III, with several workers on each. I usually put down a defense tower, a blacksmith, and a temple. Sometimes I skip the temple in favor of a second defense tower. Make at least one more barracks, maybe two. By the time your buildings finish, between trading and mining, you should have at least 750 metal and 750 stone. If not, just trade for it at the market and go to age III. If there's another metal mine within your territory, now's a fine time to build a storehouse and start putting some men on it. Keep your barracks producing and putting skirmishers on mining or woodcutting. You'll probably reach age III somewhere between 11-12 minutes if you've been alert about not letting your workers stay idle, building houses ahead of time, and keeping up constant production from your CC and barracks. In age III, research champions at a barracks. Trade for the 500 metal you need if you don't already have it. If you have extra food, keep producing women 5 at a time at the CC. Maybe stop making women and skirmishers when you're at around 120 population. You might want to pull some women off of woodcutting and put them back on farming at this point. You might need a few more fields as well. A rotary mill and the third farming upgrade will help your food production, because you'll soon need a lot of food for champions as well as metal. When you've finished researching champions, start making brythonic longswordsmen 5 at a time. Rally them all to a single place so you can more easily manage them. When you have 1000 stone, pull your stone miners and maybe some woodcutters and make a fortress near your CC. As soon as the fortress finishes, make Boudicca and put her with the champions. With 30 champions and Boudicca at around 14-15 minutes, it's time to think about who you want to kill! For extra backup you can send some skirmishers out with them, although I usually don't. Don't take a fight you think you will lose, if retreat is an option. Use ctrl-q-click to tell your army to kill units but not buildings. Once the enemy units are dead, your priority target is an enemy CC. Ctrl-click on it to attack, then when it gets to low health, regular click on it to capture. If there are metal mines out on the map, you might choose to build a second CC by them with like 20 skirmishers. You will probably be attacked but if you can get 5000 metal out of them, it's worth it. If you're feeling secure about the number of champions you have, or if you just have the resources to spare, it's time to research upgrades for your champions (infantry attack, and infantry armor) at the blacksmith. This costs a lot of wood and metal so it's best to have several dozen champions first. Also, "battlefield medicine" at the temple is important. If your metal mines are running low (before they have actually run out), stop making champions and just be defensive while you make traders. Set the trade setting 100% for metal and rally the traders to the market or dock that's farthest away, while still being somewhat protected against enemy raids. You can trade from one side of your base to another if you have to. You want to shoot for like 30 traders, maybe more if the game goes on for a long time. Protect your trade routes with towers, fortresses, and troops. If you're running into the supply cap, you can delete some of your workers to make room for more champions and traders. I usually delete women woodcutters preferentially. If the supply cap is low, such as 150, then it would be better to use corrals instead of farming. You'd have to use a whole different build for that, though. It's much more difficult to get a good corral start than a good farming start, and they require more attention throughout the game to keep making sheep. If you are low on metal and well below max supply, but have thousands of food and wood, you can mass produce cavalry skirmishers. They're nowhere near as strong as champion swordsmen and will die in an eyeblink to arrows, but they can serve as backup to your main force. They are mobile and can help defend against enemies raiding your base with cavalry. You can garrison them in ships or buildings to produce more arrows. They can also be used for scouting and killing enemy traders. If you later acquire enough metal for champions you can just suicide or delete them.

A19 - I haven't played SVN yet. I heard that in SVN the walls were made weaker, but also even cheaper and faster to build, so I'm skeptical that it's much of a nerf. We'll have to keep an eye on what the convention becomes in A20 - will good players allow walls now or will they still agree not to use them?

Good players in the multiplayer lobby, of which I am one, usually say "No Walls" at the start of the game. It's a common convention that most players agree on and often mutually assume even when it isn't said, due to how imbalanced walls are. As a result, instead of whatever the intended game use of walls is, walls are virtually never used competitively. The exception to this would be the Iberian starting walls, which are considered OK, but even the Iberian player is expected not to rebuild his starting walls if they are destroyed. I'd like to go over some of the reasons good players say "no walls." Walls are too cheap. A fortress costs far more than a wall, but has similar HP and armor. A fortress is actually more vulnerable than a wall is because it has more surface area to attack, and can be captured instead of destroyed, and can't be repaired as fast as a wall can. Realistically the price of walls doesn't make sense because in real life a fortress is little more than a series of walls and turrets surrounding a small area. You can waste hundreds of champions against a wall-fortified position manned only by civilian soldiers, without breaking it. The same number of champions would be sufficient to capture many CCs and fortresses, and indeed kill a player who should have been dead long ago. I have personally been in a game in which my opponent heavily fortified a narrow pass with many walls, turrets, siege catapults, and a fortress, and it was literally impossible to take using Briton technology which has only rams for siege. The opponent could easily destroy any rams I sent with his catapults or sending out a few cavalry champions, and any brythonic longswords I sent died to the turret and fortress arrows without making a dent in the walls, which were quickly repaired. 570 champions and many siege rams died over 2 hours for almost no progress and we had to call it a draw. Other good players have reported similar experiences. That was an extreme case, but even in less extreme cases, walls make it unreasonably easy to fortify a position. It takes a large force of champions to capture a fortress or CC. But if you surround the fortress or CC with walls, for a minimal cost, the fortress is immediately 5x harder to take. You can even delete the wall turrets if you want before building them, so that the stone cost of protecting a fortress like this is under 100. Siege should solve the problem, right? Not quite. Siege is very slow and cumbersome with poor pathing. Siege is extremely easy to destroy if you get some melee attackers over to it. And here's the kicker: walls can be repaired faster than siege can damage them! The low cost and quick build time of walls translates into a very fast repair time, so that even if you have a couple of rams bashing at the wall, citizen soldiers on the other side can prevent it from going down. Defense towers have a minimum spacing, and for good reason, to give the attacker a chance. Wall turrets have no minimum spacing and can be packed very densely. Individually they are stronger than defense towers because they have longer range, are five times as durable, and can't be captured. If you pack 10 or 20 wall turrets into a small area and upgrade them, that area becomes a meat grinder that cannot be taken unless your opponent has a vastly superior force and you should have been dead long ago. Walls allow a losing player to draw out the game for potentially hours. In conclusion, walls are too strong and unless they are seriously nerfed, good players will continue to agree not to use them. I don't have all the answers for exactly how they should be nerfed. The purpose of this post is to call to attention how serious this balance issue is, not to propose something that would definitely fix it. I do have some possible suggestions. A minimum spacing between wall turrets would be very nice, and generally giving walls worse stats, much slower repair rate, and making them more expensive would help as well. Giving siege units a 5x or 10x damage bonus against walls and wall turrets would help, too. What changes do you think would be best?